Schneider and Gouttierre say Terrorists put progress at risk in Afghanistan
Terrorists put progress at risk in Afghanistan
BY STEPHEN BUTTRY
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Terrorists, warlords and drug lords threaten to halt or reverse progress that the United States and its allies have made in Afghanistan, say leaders involved with Afghan reconstruction.
"An unrelenting battle continues in Afghanistan," said Mark Schneider, vice president of the International Crisis Group.
Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said the al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists who were routed following the Sept. 11 attack on the United States have been "replenished and reorganized."
"The continuing capacity of these terrorists to intimidate slows and even terminates reconstruction efforts," he said.
Gouttierre and Schneider testified last week at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on reconstruction.
"Despite many successes on the ground, the prospect that we could fail in Afghanistan is very real," said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chairman of the committee. "Too little assistance to Afghanistan has been provided, and often, it has come too late to address the daunting needs of that country."
Gouttierre and other experts told the committee that Afghanistan's security faces a threefold threat from resurgent terrorists, from warlords who control especially the rural areas and from drug lords whose poppy crop accounts for half of the country's gross domestic product.
Men who want legitimate jobs "are vulnerable to those who would employ them away from the process of reconstruction into the militias of warlords and the cultivation of poppies," Gouttierre said.
Robert Perito of the U.S. Institute for Peace warned that Afghanistan was in danger of becoming "a narco-state and a haven for narco-terrorism."
Schneider said U.S. efforts in Afghanistan "may fail because the administration has been unwilling to recognize the magnitude of the threats which we face and to direct sufficient political, military and financial resources to overcome them."
Witnesses warned senators that the security situation endangers plans for a presidential election in September.
Gouttierre recommended that U.S. troops pursue al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar "with 'deck-of-cards' intensity."
"They remain the real and symbolic leaders of the terrorist networks and organizations whose activities are the cause of periodic alerts in the U.S. and around the world, not those adversaries in Iraq."
Gouttierre called for better coordination and increased U.S. spending in several areas of Afghan education where UNO has already worked or is seeking grants.
He called for more teachers in Afghan schools, better distribution of textbooks and more training for teachers.
"Many current teachers do not possess any manner of formal training," Gouttierre said. UNO published textbooks and trained teachers for the start of school under the government of President Hamid Karzai in 2002.
He also called for vocational education programs to teach skills to men as the country pursues plans to demilitarize 60,000 men from militia forces. "What will they do for employment?" Gouttierre asked. "The need is severe."
UNO hopes to help with vocational and higher education in Afghanistan, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center is hoping to help in medical education.
Gouttierre sounded the most hopeful notes at the hearing. "Afghanistan has begun the process of rejoining the world economy," he said. Bazaars in the cities are thriving, he said, and "a building and rebuilding boom" in the cities gives hope "that perhaps the long national nightmare of Afghanistan is coming to an end."
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